spectacletheater – Page 78 – Spectacle Theater

EL DEPENDIENTE

Posted on October 27, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

EL DEPENDIENTE
Dir. Leonardo Favio, 1969.
78 min. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – 7:30 PM

Next month we launch our third annual Best of Spectacle, a look back at some of our highlights from the previous year. In anticipation, we revisit a gem from 2012 that didn’t make last year’s series.

Despite being considered by a handful of Spectacle programmers as one of the greatest movies we’ve ever shown, El Dependiente played to empty houses: here’s your chance to catch up with a guaranteed mindblowing, where-has-this-movie-been-all-my-life experience.

El Dependeinte is the third feature directed by Leonardo Favio, Argentina’s own Gainsbourgian renaissance man with the dual distinction of being a ’60s and ’70s pop icon and accomplished filmmaker. Whereas his first two features bear out of the influence of his mentor, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and Robert Bresson (and Crónica de un niño solo strongly suggesting Vigo’s Zéro de conduite), El Dependiente is another beast entirely that can perhaps only be compared to the startlingly similar Eraserhead (1977) in its suffocating portrayal of abject dread brutally punctuated with disturbing, absurdist humor.

Walter Vidarte plays the title clerk, who works in a hardware store in a desolate provincial town. He ashamedly finds himself indulging in fantasies of the accidental death of his kind employer so that he one day might inherit the store. Each night on his way home he becomes transfixed by a gorgeous young woman lurking under the street light. His approaching her eventually leads to a string of muted nocturne encounters in the girl’s dilapidated coutryard that grow increasingly anxious under the auspices of her doting, manically overbearing mother.

Filmed in a stark chiaroscuro rife with vast, empty spaces, eerie ellipses and an almost palpable sense of the forlorn curdling into a brooding menace, El Dependiente is, despite its considerable humor and charm, an ever-tightening knot in the stomach and one of the most abstruse, perplexing anti-date movies ever made.

COMMITTED (on 16mm!)

Posted on October 27, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

COMMITTED
Dir. Sheila McLaughlin & Lynne Tillman, 1984
USA, 77 min. 16mm.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 – 7:30PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!
MCLAUGHLIN & TILLMAN IN ATTENDANCE FOR Q&A!

Special thanks to the New York Public Library!

My favorite patient, a display of patience,
Disease-covered Puget Sound
She’ll come back as fire, And burn all the liars,
leave a blanket of ash on the ground
“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” — Nirvana

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.
From God Dies — Frances Farmer

Frances Farmer was born in Seattle in 1913. The myths surrounding her life are perhaps better known than the details. She was an actress on stage and screen through the mid 1930’s-40s, and was the subject of multiple scandals and sensationalized accounts. Despite her attempts at launching a serious career in the theater, Farmer was often cast as a harlot in B-movies at Paramount Pictures. After arrests for drunk driving and assault, Farmer was involuntarily committed to a mental institution. She spent the next seven years institutionalized, five of those years in Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, WA, receiving insulin shock and shock therapy, and even, rumor has it, a transorbital lobotomy (though there are many deniers and little proof.) Farmer was released in 1950 under her mother’s custody and her full civil rights weren’t restored until 1953.

COMMITTED (1984), co-directed by Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman, is a narrative film of the story of Frances Farmer. Highly scripted and shot in the style of 40s noirs, McLaughlin and Tillman construct a film narrated by Farmer (played by McLaughlin), in which she tells her side of the story, as “neither victim nor heroine.” COMMITTED focuses on the troubled relationship between Farmer and her mother, and examines social and political norms of the time, including the burgeoning use of psychiatry to cure “undesirables” and “disturbed” women.

The kind of horror we were dealing with was an institutionalized horror, not necessarily the most virulent physical violence, but a different kind of violence, which is the violence against ideas and the violence of the family, or the violence of psychiatry in its treatment of patients. — Lynne Tillman

Directed by Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman and starring McLaughlin, Victoria Boothby and Lee Breuer, a 16mm print of COMMITTED (1984) will be presented one night only on Tuesday, November 19th, 7:30 PM. McLaughlin and Tillman will be in attendance for a Q&A!

Poster by Barbara Kruger

COMMITTED courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

*Read the full essay God Dies by Frances Farmer, written as a high school senior, which won her First Place and $100 in a contest sponsored by The Scholastic in 1931. “If the young people of this city are going to hell,” one Baptist minister reportedly told his congregation, “Frances Farmer is surely leading them there.”

Other quotes from:
Lamche, Pascale. “Committed Women.” Framework 0.26 (Jan 1, 1985): 39.

Hamilton Morris Presents DEADLY FORCE

Posted on October 24, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

DEADLY FORCE
Dir: Richard Cohen, 1980
USA, 60 mins.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 8:00 PM

Special International Drug Day Screening!

Deadly Force is a rare documentary about rampant corruption in the LAPD directed by Richard Cohen. The doc revolves around the controversial 1977 killing of an arctic explorer turned rolicyclidine chemist named Ronald Burkholder who was found nude, masturbating, and stabbing himself with a candelabra in a busy LA intersection…and then fatally shot.

Cohen’s documentary follows the aftermath of Burkholder’s killing through court testimonies by both police officials defending their decision to use deadly force, and Burkholder’s friends and family, accusing the LAPD of brutality, corruption, and constructing a massive cover-up.

Followed by an original short by Hamilton Morris.

THE THIRD ANNUAL SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW

Posted on October 22, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – ALL DAY!

For the third year in a row, Spectacle pays humble tribute to one of the most sacred of Halloween traditions – the horror movie marathon – with THE THIRD ANNUAL SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW! This year we have another fine spread of various genre staples and a couple wildcards that defy all categorization, a couple special guests and a smattering of shorts, cartoons, promos, tunes, and more to celebrate the best holiday of them all.

As always, we’ll start promptly at noon and keep rolling all through the day and into the witching hour!

Tickets are $25 for the full day or $5 each movie!

THE ABOMINATION
Dir: Max Raven (Bret McCormick), 1986
100 min. USA.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – NOON

Presented by Massacre Video

Someone once said “Texas regional horror is the best regional horror.” It’s a bold statement, but it would be difficult to disagree. With a close community pushing the boundaries in pretty much every aspect of the genre, the output is impressive to say the least. Bret McCormick made THE ABOMINATION on Super-8 and edited it on 3/4″ and the result is a heartfelt, lo-fi, gut munching success. Disconnected sound, hallucinatory loops, chanting, droning, and a world of practical effects pepper this nightmarish vision of the Lone Star state.

Cody’s mother is very sick. Lung cancer, and it’s bad. At least that’s what the seedy televangelist Brother Fogg told her. In fact, she’s so sick that one night – in what can only be deemed a miracle from God – she coughs up the tumor that’s been ailing her. Naturally, she throws it in the trashcan. That night while Cody sleeps, the tumor crawls out of the trash, into his bed…and into his mouth. The tables have turned, as his mother regains her strength, Cody gets worse and worse. He coughs up blood and eventually hacks up a mass of gunk that he hides under his bed. Now, possessed by the titular Abomination, Cody must seek victims to appease his new master. The creature grows and grows until it fills up most of the house, a network of teeth and tentacles, always hungry for more!

THE ABOMINATION is presented by our pals at Massacre Video who have previously presented 555 (at our very first marathon) and DEMON QUEEN – a favorite from last year!

HORROR HOTEL
(aka The City of the Dead)
Dir: John Moxey, 1960.
76 min. UK.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – 2PM

Horror films don’t come much more atmospheric than John Moxey’s dark, fog drenched HORROR HOTEL (The City of the Dead). Shot in Britain and set in the eerie, forgotten Massachusetts town of Whitewood, this tale of witchcraft, murder and ghosts bares a striking structural resemblance to Alfred HItchcock’s radical horror film PSYCHO, released the same year, but combines the narrative rupture of Hitchock’s film with a more familiar set of atmospheric horror tropes taken to their most dreamlike extreme – the result is one of the most gorgeous and unsettling horror films of all time.

Nan Barlow is studying the history of witchcraft and looking to do some firsthand research. Her professor (Christopher Lee) points her toward a small forgotten Massachusetts town, Whitewood, which was the site of witch trials in the 17th century. Nan checks into a ghostly old inn and begins to investigate the story of an accused witch, Elizabeth Selwyn. When Nan doesn’t return from her trip to Whitewood her brother joins forces with a local shop owner and heads to Whitewood for answers.

HORROR HOTEL represents a high point in atmospheric horror, giving Val Lewton a run for his money and standing as an anglo analogue to Bava and Margheriti’s gothic Italo-epics. Moxey’s film is unfailingly assured in composition, pace, tone and design, and stands as an early testament to its creator’s adroitness in handling the creepy and atmospheric supernatural detective story, as Moxey would do again and again throughout the 70s in such paradigms of made for TV horror such as THE NIGHT STALKER and A TASTE OF EVIL.

SPLATTER: ARCHITECTS OF FEAR
Dir: Peter Rowe, 1986
77 min. Canada.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – 4PM

Presented by Slasher // Video

SPLATTER: ARCHITECTS OF FEAR can probably best be described as the DAY
FOR NIGHT of SOV horror. At first glance this no budget curio seems to be a post apocalyptic action fantasy, however it quickly reveals itself to be a behind the scenes documentary about the wild world of SFX splatter wizards. There’s something not quite right about this “documentary” though, and before long it becomes clear the movie we’re behind the scenes of,
does not exist, and characters we’re following are somewhere between the realistically banal and the unbelievably ridiculous – FANG, the hunchbacked, rat-eating Gory Productions mascot.

Is this strange mishmash of narrative vistas intentional? Probably not, but is this
sort of like F FOR FAKE for VHS creeps? DEFINITELY! SPLATTER: ARCHITECTS OF FEAR is an SOV fever dream that satisfies and stultifies on a few fairly interesting levels, AND it’s just really WEIRD and filled with tons of gore, synth and awesome Canadian accents!

Enjoy this absolutely bizarre, meta entry into the SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW!

SILENT MADNESS (in 3D!)
Dir: Simon Nüchtern, 1984.
93 min. USA.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – 6PM

Most slasher movies fall somewhere in between bad jazz and good pizza – at their worst they can be an uninspired interpretation of a familiar standard, and at their best they make an art out of filling you up with things that aren’t very good for you. SILENT MADNESS does both…AND IT’S IN 3D! That’s right, hot on the heels of FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3 comes this odd and largely forgotten gem about a homicidal maniac, Howard Johns, who is accidentally released from a nightmarish mental hospital. Once John’s is out he makes a b line to the sorority house where he perpetrated a sepia toned, nail gun massacre years before and it’s up to a no nonsense Doctor, Belinda Montgomery (Man From Atlantis, TONS of other 70s TV), to stop him! Dragon’s Lair, animated axes, steam pipes, sledge hammers, exercise equipment – all are employed in a 3D killing spree that’s a MUST for any 80s horror or slasher fan!

Shot in Staten Island and Jersey City, SILENT MADNESS is an east coast, autumnal slasher with a mean streak. Not surprisingly this grim little film was made by Simon Nuchtern, a sleaze veteran who shot additional footage for the notorious SNUFF (try and shower that one off) and almost compulsively seems to suffuse the proceedings with an unsettling aggression that threatens to transform into something even darker at every turn. SILENT MADNESS has the folkloric tropes which make the genre what it is (the murder turned urban legend, the homecoming, the insane parent), but also enough unique weirdness to make it unforgettable, including some really out of place naturalism thanks to Viveca Lindfors (Creepshow, Exorcist III) and Sydney Lassick (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), looking strikingly similar to a GHOULIE in a Sheriff’s uniform.

ONE dimension’s worth of substance in THREE DIMENSIONS!! (Glasses provided!)

SATAN’S STORYBOOK
Dir: Michael Rider, 1989.
85 min. USA.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – 8PM

Presented by Horror Boobs

What do a well known porn star, the writer of THE HOWLING, and a former back-up dancer for Debbie Gibson have in common?

Satan.

This anthology film follows what is certainly the whiniest version of Our Dark Lord to ever grace the hallowed slabs of analog media. SATAN’S STORYBOOK claims to be 3 stories but that’s including the wraparound. Hey, get it how you can, you know? The first actual story (told to soothe a cranky Satan) is about a serial killer named The Demon of Death who picks his victims at random out of the phonebook (kind of like the William Lustig film RELENTLESS but with different haircuts). He meets his match in the form of a metal babe named Jezebell who summons some demons of her own! The other story is about an alcoholic clown who offs himself and comes face-to-face with Death himself…though not in his traditional form.

SATAN’S STORYBOOK comes to us hot off the presses as out longtime friends and guest programmers – those loveable knuckleheads at Horror Boobs – have just re-released this beauty on glistening white VHS tapes in a fresh new case. Be sure to pick one up!

HEADLESS EYES
Dir: Kent Bateman, 1971.
78 min. USA.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – 10PM

You know how it is for starving artists, right? I mean, look at your clothes. Anyway, it used to be even harder! So hard that some of them turned to a life of crime. This is especially true in the case of Arthur Malcolm. Down on his luck, Arthur is caught robbing an apartment and loses his eye in the process. Once he’s healed he’s out on the streets and, brother, he is HEATED. Arthur sets about on a mad killing spree, gouging out the eyes of his victims with a spoon. He collects the eyes for his artwork, you see. This continues for some time with mixed results.

This film was directed by Kent Bateman, father of Jason and Justine, in the streets of a now long gone version of NYC. According to this film, it was a time when a hooker would approach a man covered in blood in the middle of the day in order to turn a trick. The good old days. In addition to this movie being totally batshit insane with a FIERCE mutant soundtrack, it’s a veritable snapshot of a city as nasty as they come. The performances are hammy and intense, like Easter dinner in a mental institution.

Not to be missed!

THE WNUF HALLOWEEN SPECIAL
????, 1987.
82 min. USA.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26TH – MIDNIGHT

Presented by Alternative Cinema

Chris LaMartina in person!

Is the legendary WNUF HALLOWEEN SPECIAL a heart warming time capsule of Halloween past replete with local commercials, holiday charm, and awkward news anchors? Is it the evidence of a strange and terrifying, occurrence caught on tape almost 20 years ago? Is it a sick hoax? Whatever it is, it’s one of a kind and IT’S ONLY AT THE SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW!

Taped off of WNUF TV-28 on Halloween Night, 1987, this strange broadcast follows local news personality Frank Stewart and a team of paranormal researchers as they set out to prove that the abandoned Webber House – the site of ghastly murders – is actually haunted through a fascinating live on-air program featuring shocking EVP recordings and one-of-a-kind Call-In seance.

This is a one of a kind,outrageously fun and unique Halloween treat! Is it real? You be the judge!

“It’s a legendary broadcast. Even though most collectors haven’t even
seen it, they’ve heard about it. With each passing year its cult
status grows.” – Robin Bougie, Cinema Sewer

“Holy crap – I remember this airing when I was a kid! Craziest thing
I’ve ever seen on live TV!” – Eduardo Sanchez, co-creator of The Blair
Witch Project

PRAXIS MAKES PERFECT: THREE FILMS BY MARGARETHE VON TROTTA

Posted on October 22, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

Margarethe von Trotta’s last two films, VISION: FROM THE LIFE OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN from 2010 and HANNAH ARENDT, released earlier this year, are both portraits of contemplative women. In contrast, this set of three films from the first decade of her career deals with praxis, and courageous women who make the leap to it.

All made in the wake of the revolutionary violence that followed the splintering of the student movement and the extraparliamentary opposition in Germany in the late 1960s, these films represent three different approaches to an analysis of the possibilities this violence opened up and those that it closed off.

They all have a factual basis: THE SECOND AWAKENING OF CHRISTA KLAGES was inspired by the case of a Munich kindergarten teacher who robbed a bank to save her daycare center from debt, and whose 1975 trial a protesting von Trotta was arrested at. THE GERMAN SISTERS, a thinly veiled account of RAF-member Gudrun Ensslin’s relationship with her reformist sister, offers a stark portrayal of Ensslin’s experience in a maximum security prison and her sister’s quest to prove that her controversial death could not have been a suicide. Finally, ROSA LUXEMBURG recounts the life of the fiery orator and revolutionary, her disappointment with the German Socialist Party’s opportunism during the war, her work with Karl Liebknecht leading up to the Spartacist uprising, and her brutal murder during its bloody suppression in 1919.

More than simple attempts to reclaim maligned or abused historical figures, these films can be seen as examinations of the systemic violence embodied in institutions like marriage, rent, legislative bodies, and prisons, and of the more or less revolutionary responses it can prompt.

THE SECOND AWAKENING OF CHRISTA KLAGES
a.k.a. Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1978
West Germany, 89 mins.
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM

To save her kindergarten from being replaced with a strip club, Christa Klages grabs the rentier-bull by the money-horns, acknowledging that real justice is something to be wrested from a reluctant society by force. Let down by a mild, too-honest protestant priest, whose sermon about martyrdom in Brecht’s Mother Courage underlines his own cowardliness, and shadowed by a resentful bank clerk whose smug volunteer police work infuriates the viewer at every turn, Christa finally finds solidarity and tenderness in a forgotten childhood friendship.

THE SECOND AWAKENING is Von Trotta’s first solo film, having collaborated with Volker Schlöndorff on THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM in 1975 and COUP DE GRÂCE in 1976.

Special thanks to MKS Video.

THE GERMAN SISTERS
a.k.a. Die bleierne Zeit, Marianne and Juliane
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1981
West Germany, 102 mins.
In German with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 5:00 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM

DIE BLEIERNE ZEIT gets its title from a poem by Hölderlin and conjures the oppressive atmosphere of postwar Germany, with the bleak and aimless consumer society being built through the “economic miracle” and the heritage of fascism that the majority of Germans were reluctant to address. Its Italian title, ANNI DI PIOMBO, became the phrase used to describe the wave of revolutionary violence and ensuing repression in Italy in the 70s. The overcast skies and modern prison blocks, along with the black and white newsreels of extermination camps and third-world misery that radicalize the Ensslin sisters, make for an overall cinematic texture that is just as leaden as the title promises.

ROSA LUXEMBURG
a.k.a. Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1986
West Germany, 120 mins.
In German with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 7:30 PM

It seems to me that this whole madhouse, this moral mire in which we now crawl, can in an instant, as if by magic, be changed into something great.

Almost thirty years before von Trotta cast Barbara Sukowa as famed political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the two of them gave cinematic expression to the life of a revolutionary theorist more impatient to grasp the reins of the historical process. Sukowa’s portrayal of “Red Rosa” is fiery and rousing, and her exhortations for the proletariat to smash the bourgeois order are so emphatic that the crowd should immediately file out of the cinema and do it.

Luxemburg has been invoked as a hero and martyr by many institutional forms of the German left, including the East German Socialist Unity Party and the present-day parliamentary party Die Linke. However, Luxemburg was critical of participation in any form of bourgeois democracy, and her intransigence is underscored in von Trotta’s film.

Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS

Posted on October 22, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

WORKING GIRLS
Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1986
USA, 93 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 10:00 PM

Independent filmmaker Lizzie Borden, director of the underground feminist classic BORN IN FLAMES (1983), directed her next feature WORKING GIRLS in 1986. Taking a more widely accessible approach in style and story structure, WORKING GIRLS follows three prostitutes working in an upscale brothel through one long day at work. The film is told largely through the eyes of Molly (Louise Smith), a woman with an Ivy League education who’s lying to her live-in girlfriend about her new job. Gina plans to open her own beauty salon when she’s saved enough money, and Dawn is a young law student trying to finish her homework in between clients.

Borden spent six months interviewing prostitutes in various economic situations to find out about the conditions in which they worked and how they felt about their jobs. WORKING GIRLS was made partly in response to some feminists’ anti-pornography stance and the Canadian documentary/exposé NOT A LOVE STORY (1981) which condemned pornography and, in Borden’s view, made many women working in the sex industry feel bad about their choices.

In this culture one hears constantly about the sacrifice you have to make for doing prostitution. I’ve been attacked by everyone: by feminists who say, ‘You’re soft-peddling prostitution; prostitution is wrong’; and by spiritual women who say you can’t have all these sexual encounters without doing damage to your soul. But nobody criticizes the forty-hour workweek. Nobody criticizes the fact that for the most part people are trained into positive thinking about jobs that don’t make use of half their talents. There are bad things about prostitution, but they’re not the ones you see in the movies.

Incredibly smart and insighful WORKING GIRLS is a film about a group of women choosing prostitution as a means to support themselves, and it succeeds at expressing a message that is neither pro- nor anti-prostitution. Through its screenplay (co-written with Sandra Kay), direction and camerawork, it reveals sex work as a normal job for many, with long hours, less than desired pay, a ringing phone, and a micro-managey boss (Madam). (Can work ever be sexy?) In addition, it consciously attempts to shift the camera-eye from a male gaze by avoiding voyeuristic approach in the cinematography.

There’s no shot in the film where you see Molly’s body the way a man would frame her body to look at it, except when she’s looking at herself that way…

WORKING GIRLS is the realest movie about sex work (and perhaps work under capitalism) we’ve seen in awhile — by no means an erotic film, it will likely make you blush and laugh awkwardly for its directness.

—

Quotes from Lizzie Borden in “Interview with Lizzie Borden.” Author(s): Scott MacDonald and Lizzie Borden. Feminist Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, The Problematics of Heterosexuality (Summer, 1989), pp. 327-245.

TIME AND TEMPERATURE score LA PERLE / THE PEARL

Posted on October 7, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

LA PERLE (THE PEARL), 1929
Dir. Henri d’Ursel
Belgium. 33 min.
Silent with a live score by TIME AND TEMPERATURE

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18TH – 8PM & 10PM
One night only!

Val Glenn (aka TIME AND TEMPERATURE) stops through on her most recent tour to provide an all new, haunting and beautiful score to the criminally unheralded slice of Belgian surrealism that is d’Ursel’s LA PERLE.

What begins as simply as a man attempting to purchase a string of pearls for his fiancee quickly becomes a strange journey home as he discovers doors leading to forests, living photographs, and a mysterious seductress that finds him at every turn.

Despite it being released almost 85 years ago, LA PERLE is strikingly ahead of it’s time. While we live in what often feels like a cinematic recycling bin, filled to the brim with tepid “re-imaginings” and “loving homages” have replaced genuine ideas. Callbacks in 1929 were downright unheard of, so the references to the works of Man Ray or Buñuel and other visually familiar cues found in LA PERLE were (are) exciting. The whole of Belgian surrealism owes much to those that came before, but the world is no worse off for it.

Join Spectacle and TIME AND TEMPERATURE as we celebrate this unsung gem for one night only in the most holy month of Autumn.

Val will have her tour cassette Fur on Fur (and other merch) for sale at both performances.

HYMNS OF THE GOLDEN BAT

Posted on October 3, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

HYMNS OF THE GOLDEN BAT
In Search Of The Original Caped Crusader

Various. 100 minutes.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24TH – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Consistent with SPECTOB3R’s enveloping mist of strange-smelling macabre, please join us for a one-off tribute to Japan’s Ōgon Batto (alias Fantaman / Fantasmagórico / Phantoma.)

A flying, self-teleporting and invincible “god of justice” (whose family is originally from Atlantis), the Bat was frozen in an Egyptian sarcophagus for two thousand years before being rediscovered by a little girl and announcing himself – reanimated by her tears – as a “protector of the weak.” Wraithlike and never not grinning, the Bat strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies and metes out punishment before retreating to his maximum security hideout somewhere in the Japanese alps in a snap.

Although the Bat first became famous across Japan for his appearances in manga, his initial origins are something of a mystery. It has been proposed that the Bat was adapted from a series of no-name pulp novels reaching back to the era of World War I; alternately, some have theorized that the Bat was born in a type of serialized Japanese street theater called kamishibai, appearing on watercolor-painted slides run in and out of a portable stage.

Whatever his true origins, it’s worth remembering that the Bat always existed as an image first – a visual punch to the brain, really – with any number of plots and stories conveniently wrapped around him. By the 1950s and 60s, the Bat was a force for Japanese pop culture, and soon fans were clamoring to see him emblazoned on both big and small screens. Priming audiences for the Bat’s hugely successful anime series on Saturday morning TV, Toei released Hajime Satô’s brassy, shimmering widescreen Golden Bat in 1966.

Slathered in lush you-can’t-make-this-up eye candy, the film sits at the zenith of gonzo postwar Japanese phantasmagoria. Chock full of laser beams, spaceships, teleportations, photon-clones, giant drills, a space-crab villain with two giant iron vice-grips for hands, a sinister cult of scarred-flesh mutant scientists and the Bat’s unstoppable prowess in hand-to-hand combat, Golden Bat is unmissable for fans of Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider or Ishirō Honda’s masterful space opera Gorath. (With a very young Sonny Chiba!)

Prior to Satô’s film, we’ll be hopscotching around the Bat’s mysterious perennial appearances/evaporations in the anime world over the last five decades as well – because some legends never die.

(Poster by Andrew “Drinkman” Cimelli)

CHROME CANDLES VIEWING HOUR: An A/V Salon

Posted on October 3, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21ST – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

A new series! Artists include:

> Eric Barry Drasin
>> Sofy Yuditskaya
>>> Chris Jordan
>>>> Matthew Romein
>>>>> Grayson Earle

+++ curated by Eric Barry Drasin

Chrome Candles Viewing Hour is a beta-space where artists working in experimental audiovisual performance can exhibit work. The purpose of the beta space is to provide a discerning but open context to perform works in progress, discuss work, and receive valuable feedback.

The emphasis for this salon is experimental video and sound performance, live cinema, and interactive instrument design. We are interested in works centered around performers utilizing and building interfaces to generate and manipulate media in real-time.

The format will include performances and artist talks about process and performance techniques.

We hope to stimulate conversation about how we can push the boundaries of our work into new directions, in a context that is conducive to the presentation of audiovisual and new media performance.

AN EVENING WITH TOMMY TURNER

Posted on October 1, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 at 7:00 and 9:30 PM

Two shows! One night only! Turner in attendance for discussion at both shows with Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Director, Electronic Arts Intermix

Tickets available at the door

Spectacle is pleased to welcome Tommy Turner for a very special screening of works made in the mid-1980’s and the Brooklyn premiere of his latest video, THE BLACK KNIGHTS OF SKILLMAN. Among the other work, we’re pleased to offer a pristine, restored 16mm presentation of WHERE EVIL DWELLS, made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz.

An artist working in print, performance, photography, and film, Turner is considered a key figure of Downtown No Wave Cinema. The New York native rose to prominence through his zine Redrum and collaborations, both in front of and behind the camera, with David Wojnarowicz and Richard Kern. In the mid-1980’s, Turner directed a number of arresting small gauge films that have in the intervening years only gained the ability to inspire shock, awe, revulsion, and — depending on the audience member’s orientation — deeply satisfying laughter. In a cinematic oeuvre running approximately feature length, his subject matter has touched upon Satanism, family dysfunction, heresy, taxidermy, addiction, dismemberment, dumbshit rock ‘n’ roll, arcane mysticism, torture, Evangelicism, murder, and misspent teenhood, all rendered in sadistically graphic detail that verges between clinical detachment and sardonic irreverence.

Among them is WHERE EVIL DWELLS (Super 8-to-16mm, 1986, 31 min.), co-directed with Wojnarowicz. The pair of friends became fixated on the recent story of Ricky Kasso, teenage heavy metal fan and self-described “Acid King” of Northport, Long Island, who became the subject of media hysteria when he committed the pseudo-ritual-satanic murder of a fellow teen in the woods while wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. Shooting off a script based on interviews with Kasso’s friends, the pair ultimately edited their footage into a 30-minute “trailer” that represents an anarchic, assaultive, and wildly expressionistic take on what Wojnarowicz described as “the imposed Hell of the suburbs.” It’s complemented by a spectacular title song by Wiseblood (a collaboration between Roli Mosimann of Swans and J.G. Thirlwell of Foetus) and distorted hard rock radio jams.

In the unsettling, absurdist SIMONLAND (Super 8-to-video, 1984, 11 min.), made with Richard Kern, a televangelist leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says with grotesque results. THE MAGICIAN (Super 8-to-video, 1998, 9 min.), shot with Rick Rodine, features a chaotic melange of documentary, performance, and found footage to riff on the destruction of elements fire, water, air, and earth.

The program culimates in the Brooklyn premiere of THE BLACK KNIGHTS OF SKILLMAN, an HD experimental narrative shot on location at Flynn’s Garden Inn, a neighborhood pub in Sunnyside, Queens, located around the corner from Turner’s current residence. Cast with a colorful selection of roughneck regulars and freaks, SKILLMAN is an off-the-wall, gory gangster fantasy that is as much a neighborhood portrait as a journey into Hell. Having more in common with Blood Feast than Cheers, SKILLMAN has the feel of a collaborative effort while maintaining Turner’s distinctive signature.

The films in this program are graphic and disturbing. Audience discretion is strongly advised.

WORKING GIRLS Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1986 USA, 93 min.

WORKING GIRLS
Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1986
USA, 93 min.